By Mary Ellen Dougherty, SSND
Sister Maura Eichner died November 15, 2009. She taught English and was Chair of the English Department at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland (now Notre Dame of Maryland University) for 49 years, retiring in 1992. This essay was originally written as the introduction in her last volume of poetry, published posthumously, After Silence: Selected Poems of Sister Maura Eichner, SSND. The book illustrates the integration of three major disciplines in Maura's life: School Sister of Notre Dame, poet and teacher. Maura taught as a poet and wrote as a teacher. And she did both always within the larger framework of her vocation as School Sister of Notre Dame.
Sister Maura Eichner was born in Brooklyn, NY on May 5, 1915. When she entered the Congregation of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in 1933, she hoped to dedicate her life to teaching young children, preferably the poor. By 1943, however, she was assigned to teach in the English Department at College of Notre Dame of Maryland. She continued there with outstanding success until 1992. Between 1945 and 1989, she published 10 books of poetry, including Initiate the Heart, The Word Is Love, Walking on Water, What We Women Know and Hope Is a Blind Bard. Her poems were published in many literary magazines and journals, including Lyric, America, Yale Review and Commonweal; she also published numerous newspaper and journal articles.
A School Sister of Notre Dame for more than 75 years, Sister Maura lived nearly half that history in a relatively fixed, pre-Vatican II culture, and the remaining years in a rapidly changing culture of religious life that demanded vision, faith, and flexibility. In pre-Vatican religious life, where routine and rule prevailed, Sister
Maura lived a rich and creative life as well as a highly relational life within the Notre Dame community. When Vatican II eased the constraints that canon law and custom had for years imposed on religious communities, Sister Maura found a rhythm and routine within that freedom. Her poems drawn directly from religious life and her sisters in community reflect and transcend both pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II cultures.
Maura taught with grace and intensity. Over the years she won several teaching awards, both local and national, including the prestigious Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for outstanding contributions to Catholic higher education. In her poem ''A Short History of the Teaching Profession," written perhaps for one of her own teachers, she says: ''All those words that fountained/from her have gathered into streams/that fountain other streams forever." Maura's teaching, too, is a testament to this kind of "gathering." In 21 years of Atlantic magazine student writing contests, Notre Dame students, inspired by Maura, won an astonishing 297 awards, including nine first-place awards. Her students continue her legacy in their writing and publishing, as well as in their teaching.
The diversity of poetic form and the scope of subject matter gathered here demonstrate both the complexity and simplicity of her work. In form, they range from simple couplets and quatrains to the villanelle and sestina, from metered verse to free verse. Moving from Euripides to Samuel Beckett, from Augustine to an anonymous rabbi at a bus stop, from an old nun in chapel to a monastery dog, the subject matter reflects her range as a reader a well as her capacity to be present to the moment. The body of the work suggests her profound intuition and intelligence as poet and person. The force of the poetry is lodged in the power of her hope, belief, and wonder at the human spirit and God at work in the human spirit. This is vintage Maura.
Sister Maura was a poem in motion. Her presence intimated the transcendental, even when the conversation was about the mundane. Her voice - strong, steady, yet gentle - communicated a quiet authority. Graceful and articulate, always with the precise image and phrase to clarify a point, she was quiet and spectacular at the same time. Students were universally stilled by her well-crafted lectures. As a poem draws its central image to the quiet impact of conclusion, Sister Maura ended her classes exactly on time, leaving her students knowing there was nothing more to be said. Her classes, like her person, induced the great silence.
As a teacher and as a poet, Sister Maura was a believer. She believed in beauty - in art, in nature, in music, in painting, in language. Sister Maura believed in life, and she believed in people. Above all, she believed simply and deeply in a God who believed in beauty, and in life, and in people. In one of her later notebooks, Sister Maura wrote "One writes poetry in order to find God." One may well read Sister Maura's poetry for the same reason.
